


Cravats Likely

by AMarguerite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 01:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6544873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of various ficlets from tumblr, generally featuring Enjolras and Courfeyrac, all in some way involving a prompt that included cravats.  I must have a niche.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by pilferingapples: Enjolras, Finding Apartments ? any Friends welcome, Cravats Likely. XD

Enjolras, wishing to do a good turn for someone who seemed to do nothing but good turns for others, decided to help Courfeyrac find lodgings for the newest companion of his bosom, a balding fellow named Bossuet. 

“Really his name is L’aigle, or Legle, or Lesgles,” said Courfeyrac, as they ran down several flights of stairs, away from the tenant who had not known his apartment was now available and was understandably angry at this new information, “but we call him Bossuet because he was from Meaux.” Even scant of breath, Courfeyrac managed the the wide, almost smug grin that was his invariable response to his own puns. “Get it? The Eagle of Words? The orator Bossuet?”

“Does he do funeral orations?” asked Enjolras, at the next apartment (the gentleman living there recognized Enjolras (or rather his hair) as the person-shaped blob who had been helping Bahorel punch said apartment-renting gentleman, and several of that gentleman’s friends).

“He had better,” said Courfeyrac, when the next apartment turned out to have a bee hive in the wall. “It is the very least we can do, when we obviously are risking life and limb for him to perch on— yes, yes not my best but  _ohmigod you are covered in bees!_ ”

It was really just four confused drones, but they were all on Enjolras’s cravat, so this miscount could be excused. Combeferre dealt with the situation with far too much calm. “Why not see if Bossuet and Joly get on well together?” asked Combeferre reasonably. He took a pair of tweezers out from his black bag and began neatly digging stingers out of Courfeyrac’s yellow gloved fingers, already immune to the melodramatic whimpers and creative swearing of his patient. “Joly has been looking for a roommate. Coal has grown so dear he is looking to cut expenses.”

As it turned out, Joly’s mistress very much liked Bossuet, so the matter was settled to everyone’s satisfaction. 

… except, that was, for Joly’s exasperated landlady, whose week was made lively with a new tenant moving in, an infestation of rats, and then (upon the new tenant’s advice), an infestation of feral cats. 

"Perhaps he does not write funeral orations,” said Courfeyrac to Combeferre and Enjolras, when Joly chipperly informed them that the feral cat in the water closet was having kittens, “but Bossuet certainly creates a need for them.”


	2. I misread this prompt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Enjolras surprising Courfeyrac on his birthday, coughwearingnothingbutacravatcough with a perfectly done cravat that's very on trend?

“Once again,” said Enjolras, “I am moved to say that you have taken a pun too far.”

Courfeyrac had earlier protested he was drunk only on liberty and good cheer but it was becoming clear that “liberty and good cheer” was actually a euphemism for ‘rum punch everyone had unwisely allowed Bahorel to mix.’ Enjolras had been quietly pleased that his friends had cared enough to arrange some sort of a party for him, though most of their entertainments he enjoyed more as 'things to entertain the people he loved most in the world’ than 'things he found enjoyable.' 

“You’re– you’re one to talk about taking puns too seriously,” protested Courfeyrac. Or at least, so Enjolras thought. Courfeyrac tended to get very regional when drunk. The lilting, almost Italinate pronunciations drifted into Enjolras’s ear strangely, as if bourn over by the Mistral. “What about….”

“Yes?”

“Alphabet,” muttered Courfeyrac, picking up one of his discarded items of clothing. “That seems important.”

After a moment, Enjolras said, “What are you doing, Courfeyrac?”  
  
With a frankly bewildered look, Courfeyrac said, “Trying my cravat.”

“Ah.” Enjolras folded his arms, in a vague attempt to cradle and protect the tenderness and fondness in his breast. “I had thought you were not adhering to the cult of dandyism this evening.”

Courfeyrac turned around, a hand to his immaculate cravat. He was wearing nothing else. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“It seems clear to me,” said Enjolras, “that this evening you are playing the part of a sans-culotte."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bootssssss: Something from A Passion for the Absolute ‘verse, perhaps involving cravats?

“Channeling Marat today, I see?”

Enjolras, still deep in thought over inheritance laws in the Napoleonic Code, did not quite follow this associative leap. He looked down in himself and the first two concerns– am I somehow in a bathtub? Have I been stabbed by a Girondist?– proved to be unfounded. He was sitting in Courfeyrac’s desk chair, at Courfeyrac’s desk, far from both bath water and knives. “This isn’t some elaborate plot to tell me you’re a Girondist, is it?”

“Me? A Girondist?” Courfeyrac tossed aside his lecture notes and swooned onto the divan, head lolling against an arm rest, and his right hand trailing on the floor, Marat-like.  “Enjolras, how _could_ you say such a thing to me?”

Enjolras struggled against a smile. He was still unused to Courfeyrac’s teasing, and liked it. Enjolras’s everyday manner normally did not invite levity; and yet, somehow, without ever having to change himself, or alter his way of sitting or speaking or thinking, he could somehow provoke it in Courfeyrac. 

“I am hurt, dreadfully hurt,” said Courfeyrac, still posing. 

“Stabbed through the heart,” agreed Enjolras.

“Don’t tell _me_ you’re the Girondist.”

“No, otherwise I would have stabbed you through the lung, as well.”

Courfeyrac lifted his head. “Did Charlotte Corday get him in the lung too? Never mind, I should know by now not to question your knowledge of the minutae of the French Revolution.”

Enjolras smiled. “You have bettered me on one point– how precisely, am I channeling Marat by studying my lecture notes?”

Courfeyrac slid nimbly off the couch and perched on the edge of the desk. The Romantics of Enjolras’s acquaintance were forever trying to use as chairs everything but actual chairs. Courfeyrac was fond of perching on tables, trunks, fountain ledges, desks, and the bases of statues. Jehan and Bahorel’s creative definition of chairs was still perplexing enough to defy coherent categorization. Enjolras stuck to the chair, but leaned back in it, so he could better smile up at Courfeyrac. 

Flicking playfully at the ends of Enjolras’s cravat, Courfeyrac said, “Your cravat, man!”

“Oh.” Enjolras looked down. His cravat had unraveled. He wondered, vaguely, and without much actual interest, when that had happened. 

“It looks like you just looped the ends over each other.”

“I did.”

Courfeyrac looked at him with fond exasperation. 

The cravat was a matter of supreme indifference to Enjolras, but he knew it would give Courfeyrac pleasure to ask, “Will you fix it for me?”

Much to his surprise, Courfeyrac seized the knot and used it to pull him closer. “No,” said Courfeyrac, against his lips. “I like it like this.”

Enjolras found he did as well.


End file.
